A sigh of relief

[sinanju]

I now have my entire system, from OS to my most recent fanfic efforts archived on DVDs. Three of them. Two for the system and all the software (a combined total of about 8 gb) and another for the documents, music, videos, images and download and /etc folders (2.5 gb). The last full backup was in January, six months ago.

Since I can't rewrite DVDs (I understand that rewrite-able DVDs exist but that "only a madwoman" would trust them), depending on how often I backup everything, I could burn through a boatload of DVDs. Admittedly, I don't need to backup my whole system every time--aside from adding an occasional new piece of software or tweaking settings, that won't change much. But still.

I thought about getting a flash drive to make interim backups of my data files (documents, music, videos, images, etc). But I'm told that they're not reliable enough for that, not in the long run. But what about the short run. Assuming I did a full backup of all my data to a DVD on a monthly basis, is a flash drive trustworthy enough for keeping up with day-to-day additions?

Anyone? Anyone? Bueller?

Comments

[aquamarcia.livejournal.com]

It's not too hard to get blank DVDs for 20 cents/disc if you catch sales at Fry's (though stay away from the off-brand stuff; I use TDK, sometimes Memorex). At that price you can make a ton of backups and still not be out much money.

As for interim backups, that's what you'd use a rewritable DVD for, rather than a flash drive. When you have an interim backup you want to make permanent, just copy the rewritable DVD to a write-once DVD and you're done.

[chris-goodwin.livejournal.com]

What software do you use for backups? (I run Debian so it shouldn't be too hard to find.)

[sinanju.livejournal.com]

I'm running SUSE 10.1. For the major system backup, I use the built-in backup software via YAST (the default software management). For my data, I'm trying out something called simplelinuxbkup, downloaded from sourceforge.net. I read about it in a Linux magazine. It can be set up to run a weekly complete backup and do daily incremental backups. I'm trying it out to see how I like it.